Author-Meets-Critics Roundtable: Adeana McNicholl, Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics

This roundtable brings author Adeana McNicholl together with scholars of Buddhism to discuss her 2024 book Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics. The book brings together South Asian narratives about humans reborn as pretas to trace the construction of the preta realm through narrative literature. The book’s analysis is divided into two parts, combining a historical approach to preta narratives with a literary one that considers the aesthetically and emotionally transformative aims of Buddhist literature for embodied ethical cultivation. As such, the book brings forward crucial insights, both methodologically and substantively, into the study of Buddhist cosmology, South Asian storytelling, and Buddhist ethics.

Part One offers an intervention to the study of cosmology by intervening in the common projection of the “hungry ghost,” made popular by the Chinese translation, onto the early Buddhist landscape. Such monolithic portrayals of pretas as “hungry ghosts” imply that Buddhist cosmology came into being fully formed with the founding of Buddhism. To the contrary, McNicholl illustrates that cosmologies are constructed over a long, cumulative, and uneven process. Although “sinicization” discourses have in part focused on the role of the ancestors in Chinese religious practices, McNicholl traces the importance of the ancestral departed for South Asian Buddhists and attests to the role of ancestral discourse in Buddhist discourses of karma. By exploring issues like where the departed go after they die, how the living can assist the dead in the next world, and how the departed fits into a karmic cosmology, Buddhist authors used these stories to construct the preta realm and with it Buddhist cosmology as we know it today.

While Of Ancestors and Ghosts engages with Buddhist treatises, it asserts that Buddhist narrative literature not only provides a vital lens for the construction of cosmological and ethical worldviews, but that it was also the primary genre through which the contours of the preta world were mapped and negotiated. In doing so, it intervenes in the epistemological priority of belief that proposes that narratives can only ever reflect higher doctrine, rather than help shape it. It also builds on the work of scholars like Naomi Appleton (2017) in reading stories as important tools for the process of identity formation in South Asia, arguing that constructing a realm for the pretas involved making a choice among various alternatives about the location of the departed after death, their relationship with the living, and the impact of actions on one’s next life. As a result, these texts not only help craft a new identity for the preta that became differentiated (but never fully separate) from the Brahmanical departed.

Part Two builds on prior scholarship to argue that cosmological literature is thoroughly implicated in ethical imagination. By focusing on the non-human preta, who demonstrates a distinctly embodied cognition of karma that enables it to teach others, the book traces out the entanglements of embodiment and the Buddhist vision of karma within which moral possibility is embedded. It builds on Suzanne Mrozik’s (2007) conception of the Indic physio-moral worldview to connect pretas to a wide range of embodied experiences in the Buddhist cosmos, including the intersection of human/non-human identity and class, caste, gender, and sexuality.

In tracing out the embodied ethical vision of these stories, Of Ancestors and Ghosts intervenes in the reduction of karma tales as simple scare tactics to enforce a Buddhist worldview. Instead, McNicholl proposes that preta tales help model and elicit aesthetically informed embodied experiences that are themselves ethically formative. The affective dimension of these stories is key to their ethical efficacy and their formulation of embodied ethical action. While the affective dimension of preta literature helps create what Sara Ahmed (2004) calls an “affective economy” that lends weight to the hierarchical dimension of the physio-moral karmic universe Of Ancestors and Ghosts suggests that key emotions like shock (saṃvega) can also help undo these hierarchies to adopt an ethics of care toward the ancestors, unhappy dead, and poor. As a result, preta literature speaks to the enduring importance of emotions and embodiment on the Buddhist path to awakening and the role of aesthetics for interpretations of karma.

This roundtable, composed of interdisciplinary scholars focusing on Buddhism in diverse times and places, will consider the implications of McNicholl’s book for the study of Buddhist cosmology and ethics in South Asia and other Buddhist regions. Panelist 1 is an intellectual historian who examines how karmic theory has been refashioned into an experience-informed, action-oriented moral reasoning by 20th-century Buddhist reformers, challenging scholars to attend to the robust Buddhist karmic mode of moral reasoning. Panelist 2 is a social historian of subaltern ascetic practices in South Asia. With Panelist 1, they will enable the roundtable to consider the ethical imperatives of karma talk in the past and the present. Panelist 3 is a scholar of Buddhist philosophy whose research focuses on a deep engagement with the experiences of nonhuman beings. They will be able to engage in the book’s approach of using cosmological literature as a window into Buddhist moral and soteriological thinking. Panelist 4’s research examines religious authority in South Asian Buddhist literature. Their interest in the interplay of texts, rituals, and aesthetics will enable them to speak to the book’s attention to the emotional productivity of preta literature. Panelist 5’s research examines the transformation of Chinese rituals into Japanese ghost-feeding rituals, while Panelist 6 explores the contemporary relevance of ancestors and ghosts in Southeast Asian religious life. Together they will provide comparative contexts for ghost practices and allow the panel to consider the enduring repertoires of preta stories and practices and the reshaping of pretas in new contexts. The author will act as respondent. Together, these participants will allow the roundtable to consider the ethical imperatives of karma talk in the past and the present and the role of Buddhist historiography for the study of marginalized communities.